A five-day South India People’s Theatre Festival brought to the city a series of plays that espoused democratic values.
The festival was inaugurated on October 2, marking the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. This is the second edition.
The first edition, held in February 2017 at Thanjavur, was a four-day affair. This year, the festival was held for five days. The themes were predominantly about struggles against the caste system and liberation and travails of workers.
“Chennai-based urban, rural, open air and street theatre troupes, performed at the festival,” said Pralayan, secretary of the festival committee. His drama troupe, the Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, presented Veerayi , a poem set in the 1947 by Tamil Oli, about the travails of a woman Veerayi who migrates to work in South Africa’s tea plantations.
“Indian theatre is mostly visited by middle-class audiences. There are some groups that stage plays for the working class or for slum residents. There is another dimension to it,” Mr. Pralayan said, drawing parallels to the people’s theatre movement of the 1960s in the United States launched by activist Amiri Baraka.
Baraka’s themes in writings focused on the liberation of African-Americans. “He called it spiritual and an aesthetic sister to regular theatre,” Mr. Pralayan said, adding, “It is about the ‘power to the people’ concept, which has the highest value in a democracy.”
The festival did not include traditional theatre groups as the theme was “parallel and modern”. Troupes from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh participated.
